Richard Harries spoke this week in Thought for the Day about the link between authority and truth. Jesus was seen to speak with authority because he radiated truth not just in what he said, but in who he was. In St John’s gospel from the prologue onwards – the Word is described as full of grace and truth. But what do we mean when we proclaim the truth of the gospel, whilst arguing vigorously among ourselves about what the truth is?
The question arose quite unexpectedly while I was on holiday this year. Our walking group had stopped to admire the French Protestant church in the little town of Meyrueis in the heart of the Cévennes. A large text dominated the wall over the communion table, sober and unadorned in the manner of the Eglise Réformée de France God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship in spirit and in truth (John 4.24). To me the choice of text was unsurprising as a statement which might be held to justify the sobriety of Protestant worship in the face of what were perceived as over-elaborate Catholic rituals. But to one of our walking companions, perhaps less aware of the historical and ecclesiastical context, the words were puzzling. He could see that God must be worshipped in spirit, but what could it mean to worship God in truth? He was a judge, and as a judge he probably felt that he knew about truth truth was something to be demonstrated on the basis of reliable, objective evidence. I can only suppose he was thinking that there is no such evidence for the existence of God belief in God is a matter of faith, not objective proof so how could one speak of worshipping God in truth?
And that set me thinking, because truth is important to me too. We all think we know what truth is, but do we? As I read or hear conflicting or at least incomplete accounts from different points of view of how some obscure aspect of policy took shape, I want to get as close as I can to the truth. But truth is a rather more elusive concept than my learned walking companion perhaps allowed. Philosophers have worried at it through the centuries. Bishop Berkeley, for example, in the 18th century, wondered whether things actually existed when we don’t apprehend them with our senses. His puzzle was summed up, much later, in a limerick by Ronald Knox which some of you may know:
There once was a man who said, ‘God
Must find it exceedingly odd,
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s noone around in the Quad
Knox was Chaplain of Balliol College, Oxford at the time hence the reference to the tree in the Quad. A rejoinder was published in The Times a few days later: Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God
Let’s not get too hung up in the tree, but these exchanges do offer an entertaining illustration of the two principal philosophical approaches to truth, the first positing the objective reality of the tree in the Quad, the second asserting that truth is much more relative, depending on and influenced by my observation of it. We might agree that a positivist approach to truth as an objective reality will serve well enough for our understanding of the natural world, and even in relation to evidence in a court of law.
But as soon as we start to deal with people instead of things, the alternative, hermeneutic or interpretist approach cannot be so easily dismissed. It is possible to approach social realities in an objective, realist manner. We can use surveys and questionnaires to find out a great deal about how people behave, for example as voters, or workers or TV viewers. But people are not the same as trees. If you want to discover the truth about people, about relationships, about communities, you have to try to find out how they themselves interpret and understand what they are doing as voters, or workers or TV viewers. And that is not so easy. Different people may very well have different perceptions of the same social institution, for example marriage – or the Church. And the institutions themselves are not static they change over time, and in my capacity as observer, I cannot totally disentangle my perception of this living reality from my own experience of it. So it is that from this hermeneutic perspective, the truth, the reality I am trying to capture, the tree in the Quad so to speak, really does depend to a significant extent on my engagement with it, so that one might even go so far as to say that it is not really there when I stop looking. Marriage, for example is a social institution or structure that many of us experience as a lived experience, but not all in the same way, and that variety of experience will influence not merely our perceptions, but the reality of what marriage is for us. The same is true of the Church as an institution. The reality of the Church to me, with my particular background and baggage, is unlikely to be the same as the reality of the Church to you or anyone else, which doesn’t matter all that much, unless I want to put the Church in a box and say that it is a,b,c and not x,y,z.. Fortunately the Church of England is not much given to doing that, despite the pressures to which it is exposed.
What then of the truth of the gospel? Do we have evidence of an objective reality of the kind that my walking companion would feel compelled to accept in a court of law? I think not. There used to be quite an industry in seeking to reconcile the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and death I have a book on my shelves called ‘Who moved the stone?’ which attempted to prove the resurrection on that basis, and there has been, since Albert Schweizer, book after book attempting to delineate the real Jesus of history. But I believe that St John, the only evangelist to engage with the concept of truth as such, would be somewhat bemused by this activity. He acknowledged that one might fill the whole world with books about what Jesus said and what He did, but he had written enough, he said, for his readers to take the one step that really mattered to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and so to have life in his name (John 20.31). He was confident that the truth about God was revealed in the life and person of Jesus, and that he had said enough in the pages of his gospel for the reader to grasp that truth.
John points us to Jesus as the one final and complete revelation of the truth about God. Yet my imperfect perception of God is very likely to be different from your imperfect perception of God. From pulpits and armchairs and hospital beds, I have heard enough people talking about their perceptions of what God is like, and what he has done in their lives, to know that if we were all artists, no two pictures would be the same, but that does not mean that there is no objective reality out there, no truth to be apprehended. If there are differences in perception, they could be a function of relationship, and more particularly of our inadequate, human end of the relationship.
Which is where I come back not before time you may say to what Jesus has to say to us in the record of that final and most intimate discourse with his disciples, which St John has set down in chapters 13 to 16 of his gospel. We read only a small portion of that discourse tonight, but the heart of the matter lies in the loving relationship which Jesus has with his Father, which he now invites his disciples and us to share. ‘As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love’ (John15.9) and ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you’. Love is not something we can know by observing it objectively from outside, it is something we have to experience. As we experience what it means to love and to be loved, even on the plane of human loving, we are changed. As we open our hearts in love to the love of Jesus who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, we absorb more and more of the life-changing, life-enhancing truth about God which Jesus came to earth to share with us, that truth about His Father to which Jesus bore witness in his life and in his death, that truth of which John the disciple whom Jesus loved – was perhaps the most persuasive witness, that same truth in which we are called to worship him this night and for ever.
Handley Stevens